Visiting Speaker: Mark Neal
Thursday (today) 2:00pm
Room 78-421 (Level 4 GP South).
Mark Neal is from UNSW. Below is an abstract from Mark's paper. The talk should appeal to those interested in optimisation of complex systems.
Optimisation of a Whole-farm Model
The central aim of this project is to improve
dairy farmer’s strategic (long term)
decisions. The process involved the integration of
an economics component into an
existing whole-farm model, followed by utility based
optimisation using a genetic
algorithm. The optimisation is first conducted with
a single objective function
assuming perfect capital and labour markets for a
farmer with two investment
alternatives: a dairy farm or risk-free asset. The
problem is then broadened to a
stochastic dominance problem, where the assumption
of perfect capital markets is
relaxed. Emphasis is then placed on
post-optimisation analysis, especially through
visual approaches.